Creative Curriculum

Once, when homeschooling, I decided that for a whole week we were only going to study pirates! And that’s what we did. It was amazing. We read Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and visited the museum that displays the originals he painted for his book. We studied the Caribbean and the history of pirates. I’m sure we must have calculated the value of plunder on Black Beard’s ship and other such mind-bending activities.

Lynn’s Approach

Lynn had the same idea that I had but carried it further. She picked a topic each month, for practically all the years she homeschooled, and molded their studies around it. They studied the moon landing, the Erie Canal, Native American mythology, the Great Lakes, Aesop’s Fables, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, physics and many other topics.

Lynn started homeschooling because her oldest was bored in school. He was bright and quickly finished up assignments and sat around waiting for more. Lynn knew she could offer him more at home:

I used a math textbook when I homeschooled my kids, and I found a workbook with science experiments. But I always was looking for creative ways to jazz up learning."

Other than their monthly topic, some favorite activities included Performance of the Week, where they studied a different genre of music each month. They learned electronics using Snap Circuits, mapped the journey described in Around the World in 80 Days, explored the Olympics every time they were held, and studied different states - when they were founded, their motto, and state birds, etc.

Lynn thought a blog might be an opportunity for her oldest, Braden, to write creatively. Braden was all over the idea, “What could it be about? Oh Minecraft!!” Lynn might suggest that today he might write a post on his blog, but she didn’t tell him what to write. She didn’t proofread anything before he posted it. They talked a little about it, but it was his thing. However, she liked to keep an eye on this activity because once Braden’s on the computer, he slipped easily into watching YouTube videos of kids playing Minecraft instead of blogging about Minecraft.

In 2014, they used the book Hello World to learn Python. Susan thought it was important for her kids to learn computer programming:

I want them to be able to program. I think that’s important, to understand the basis of the Internet…I’d love for them to be able to make an app.

Last year Braden used Python to analyze wave data from the Great Lakes. Monitoring stations in the Great Lakes gathered data and Braden learned to pull that data from buoys, organize the data, graph the data, even graph multiple lakes onto the same graph. But her daughter, Brandy, wasn’t nearly as interested in programming, so Lynn took a different approach with her:

Brandy is not quite as interested in coding. I’m still looking for the right hook for her. This year we ended up reading a book called Computational Fairytales, which introduces coding concepts in a general, fairytale type story, which was the right way to do it for her.

Planning for the Week/Higher Education

While Lynn is a teacher, she didn’t write or use lesson plans. Each Sunday she planned out the week, writing out a schedule on paper and giving each child a daily list. Like many other parents, as her oldest approached high school, she began to feel nervous about whether they had covered enough material:

Oh, I can’t put it into words…you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some of this and some of that and we’d have big gaping holes, and I’d be like, “Oh, why didn’t I cover that?"

She embedded some structured learning into their projects. Early on she used a book teaching writing called Rip the Page. Writing Strands was another popular writing curriculum they u sed. But finally, as fear rattled her nerves more regularly, she purchased a classical curriculum called The Well-Trained Mind that took a more systematic approach to history and the classics. It encompassed logic and Latin and rhetoric.

We all worry about our children’s success. No matter how much we love homeschooling, and how excited we are watching our children learn, higher education casts a deep shadow over the process. A belief that a standardized curriculum will best serve students in treading the path of learning often calms one’s nerves. It takes courage to wander off the path.